44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 24, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/24/23 2:20:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has doubled the national debt, doubled the cost of housing, fuelled inflation faster than anyone in the past 40 years and raised interest rates faster than anyone in monetary history. This impacts not only Canadians' wallets, but also national unity.
The Parti Québécois has just released the first budget of an independent Quebec, justifying it by saying that this Prime Minister is putting the country and Quebec into debt.
Does the Prime Minister recognize that his policies are not worth the cost or worth dividing our country?
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- Oct/24/23 2:21:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we too extend our condolences to all those affected by this tragedy.
The Parti Québécois has once again stated it wants independence for economic reasons. That party would never have said such a thing during the Conservative years because taxes were low, debts were low, income taxes were low, inflation was low and growth was high. The Prime Minister turned all that around, and now some people in Quebec want to separate as a result.
Does he acknowledge that his policies are not worth the cost, nor are they worth dividing our country?
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- Oct/24/23 2:23:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in part because of the excellent low inflation, low tax, low debt record of the Conservatives, the separatists were a dead cause not so long ago, but his inflationary policies have brought them back.
The Prime Minister said it was justinflation when food prices went up, but then there was shrinkflation, smaller sized servings for higher prices. Now we have skimpflation, where food processors, in order to pay the carbon tax, actually strip out the nutritional value of the food.
How much health and nutrition will Canadians have to lose before the Prime Minister reverses his plan to quadruple the carbon tax to 61¢ a litre?
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- Oct/24/23 2:24:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians are living with Liberal cuts every day. They have to cut how many meals they eat. They have to cut the portions they eat. Now they are cutting the nutrition out of that food, because, after eight years, the Prime Minister's carbon tax and his inflationary policies are clearly not worth the cost or the corruption.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister's toadies in the NDP and Liberal committee blocked the RCMP commissioner from testifying about the Prime Minister blocking a criminal investigation into his SNC scandal. Now the ArriveCAN app is under criminal investigation, after wasting $50 million.
Will the Prime Minister agree to personally co-operate with this criminal investigation into his arrive scam app?
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- Oct/24/23 2:26:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after the Prime Minister amplified disinformation on the subject last week, he went into hiding, refused to answer questions and then sent out his public safety minister to offer a midnight answer.
The Prime Minister needs to speak about himself. Does he believe that the State of Israel fired a rocket or missile at the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza, yes or no?
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Mr. Speaker, as I said at the outset, I am running for prime minister to put Canadians back in control of their lives by making Canada the freest nation on earth. That freedom includes bodily autonomy, the freedom to decide what people put in their own bodies. That is why I was proud to introduce a private member's bill in the House of Commons that would put an end to COVID mandates in all of the federal sector. I want to thank the hon. member for Niagara West for having adopted my private member's bill so we can move it forward even faster.
Before the Prime Minister proceeds once gain to maliciously divide and attack, let me remind him that the position put forward in the bill is now not only the position of the common-sense Conservatives, but also the position of the majority of provincial governments, of the Liberal member for Louis-Hébert and of the military review complaints commission, the tribunal responsible for hearing grievances from members of the armed forces.
I will also remind the Prime Minister that the position reflected in the bill is now his position. Members may question why I would say that. The reason is that the Prime Minister had the temerity to go on television about three months ago and claim he never forced anyone to get vaccinated. He claimed it should be a matter of personal choice. He wanted us all to forget the way he divided, insulted and name-called millions of people right across this country who are patriotic, law-abiding, decent people. If he really believes he never forced mandates on anyone, surely he will be happy to vote for this bill to ensure those mandates do not apply anymore and will never be imposed again.
Let me be clear about what this bill would do. This bill targets the unreasonable overreaches of the federal policy and unjustified abuses of federal government power. The bill targets these overreaches and abuses of power based on two different but important types of evidence. First, it follows the scientific evidence about COVID-19 vaccines, how they work and what they do. Second, it responds to the evidence from the experience of the government's decision to exploit a public health situation for partisan political gain.
This was most clear in the Prime Minister's deliberate decision to go beyond guiding and protecting Canadians, to punishing people who chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Let us remember that the Prime Minister originally said vaccines would be a matter of personal choice. Then he did a poll showing that it would be popular to target a small minority of people who chose not to be vaccinated. He flip-flopped and said he would make it mandatory, and three days later, he called an election and attempted to exploit that political moment in order to regain power.
This is funny: When he announced that the vaccine mandates would be imposed on the federal sector, he did it with such political haste, based on the advice of not public health experts but polling experts, that even his own human resources team at the Treasury Board put out guidelines suggesting that it would be a matter of personal choice, not mandatory imposition. While he was advocating for a mandate, his own bureaucracy published rules against a mandate. That is because they were following the medical science and he was following political science.
This bill would put into law a prohibition on the government imposing COVID mandates again in the future. Members may wonder why the government would need such a prohibition given that it has reluctantly agreed to remove mandates for most federally employed workers. The answer is that the government has kept open the possibility of reimposing mandates, both on federal workers and on federally regulated travel.
Furthermore, there continue to be military service members who face vaccine mandates today. It is ironic that these same military service members could legally go into a bar and French kiss with a perfect stranger, but they could not do their jobs in the armed forces. How is that scientifically sound? They could not, for example, go out into a field and practise with their fellow members in infantry, but they could do things that involve far greater and more intimate personal interaction in public places, according to the law. How could that possibly be based on science?
We know that it is not and never was, because we now know that the military grievance tribunal has ruled that the government's imposition of mandates on service members violated the section 7 charter rights of those members and that the violation was not justified under section 1 of the charter, which gives the government the ability to override rights in order to uphold reasonable public interest requirements. The government's own grievance tribunal has found that the mandates violated the charter when it comes to members of the armed forces, yet still the mandates remain in place in open violation of the Charter of Rights. That is not according to the Leader of the Opposition and not according to the countless civil libertarians who have been advocating for an end to these mandates, but according to the government's own grievance tribunal and according, moving out of the military to the rest of the federal sector, to the PIPSC, the CAPE and the PSAC, three public sector unions representing 300,000 federal public servants, who have brought legal challenges against this government saying that its blanket policy was “punitive”, “unreasonable” and an “abuse of management authority”.
To quote the unions, “There was no proper consultation, nor a comprehensive process of correctly identifying all the possible circumstances faced by our members. Appropriate solutions were not developed by the employer to deal with many individual situations.” However, the Prime Minister did not listen to them. He continued to go forward with firing federal employees who were not vaccinated, and he kept this policy in place even after his public health officer said, “we do need to get back to some normalcy.”
I will go back to the Military Grievances External Review Committee on this point, which said:
...I conclude that the limitation of the grievors' right to liberty and security of the person by the [Canadian Armed Forces] vaccination policy is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice because the policy, in some aspects, is arbitrary, overly broad and disproportionate. Therefore, I conclude that the grievors' rights protected under section 7 were infringed.
However, that policy goes on.
The review committee continued:
...I find that termination of service for some members was a disproportionate response to their non-compliance with the vaccination policy.... I conclude that it was overly broad and not using the least restrictive option in its implementation.... I find that the disputed provisions of the CAF vaccination policy are unconstitutional and, therefore, invalid.
This is the government's own grievance tribunal saying this, yet our heroes, soldiers who loyally serve, follow the law and put their lives on the line for this country, are out of jobs, out of income and out of justice. My bill, the bill now adopted by the member for Niagara West, would restore that justice by putting an end to COVID vaccine mandates and ensuring that no such new mandates are reimposed in the future on our brave soldiers, sailors and airmen, on our public servants and on Canadians seeking to travel in federally regulated sectors.
The Prime Minister has withdrawn and apologized for some of the extremely incendiary and divisive comments he made about Canadians who made different medical decisions than he would have made. Adopting this bill would be a recognition that this ugly chapter in our history of turning Canadian against Canadian and using a public health matter to pull apart our country and grab more power is permanently behind us.
Let us recognize that Canadians have freedom of choice over what they put into their bodies. Let us adopt this legislation. Let us restore personal freedom. Let us give Canadians back control of their lives in the freest nation on earth.
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